Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.djvu/428

416 that this could harm or hinder the spiritual direction of thought. A student's mental malpractice called my attention to this question for the first time, and placed it in a new moral and physical aspect. By thorough examination I learned that manipulation hinders, instead of helps, mental healing. It establishes a mesmeric connection between patient and practitioner that is fatal to health, and far from the Science of Being. It gives personal sense preponderance and additional power to harm. It acts as error instead of Truth. Mesmerism injures the sick, and must always prevent a scientific result. This is true of mediumship also.

Studying and observing human error more thoroughly, I have learned that mesmeric influence is not confined to manipulation, but is employed variously, and becomes the subtle agent of the worst crimes that mortals can commit. It is far safer to live unprotected from the contamination of physical plagues, than to inhabit the realm of mortal thought, and be unprotected by Christian Science against this pestilential mental action.

Animal magnetism is the voluntary or involuntary action of error in all its forms, and is the human antipodes of Divine Science. Before discovering, in 1872, the action of this mischievous agent, I supposed that the consent of the victim was essential to its operation. Knowing that it was impossible for my system of mental practice to produce bad effects, I gave no thought to the counteraction of this mental influence, until I was roused to investigate it for the protection of the human race.

Science must triumph over sense, and Truth over error, so determining the facts involved in these theories